If you'd like to be even more shocked about our history than you may already
be, read David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard which is about Alan Dulles. I
read The Brothers, and that was bad enough. This stuff is worse!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 11:55 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal
Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism
If it ain't Israel, it will be the Sheik of Glubberstan or Yemmanichristmas.
Some little strategic piece of Land that is important to the various
Empires, jockeying for control. America has so much blood on her hands that
Miss Liberty has a hard time holding up that torch. None of the front
runners for the Brass Ring called the presidency, will dare to present a
plan to end the Eternal War.
Since I can't see how we can afford to keep enriching our Lords, and at the
same time make improvements in the Working Classes lot, I probably will
withdraw my vote altogether.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/9/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
White House official.
Greenwald writes: "Clinton's words read like the ultimate loyalty
oath: 'I have stood with Israel my entire career ... As president, I
will continue this fight.'"
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on
Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
09 November 15
Leaked internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center
for American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies
involving the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning
on Israel. They reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in
order to placate AIPAC and long-time Clinton operative and Israel
activist Ann Lewis including censoring its own writers on the topic
of Israel.
The emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAPs
controversial decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as A
Conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will feature CAP
President Neera Tanden and Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they
explore ways to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the
United States. That a group whose core mission is loyalty to the
White House and the Democratic Party would roll out the red carpet for
a hostile Obama nemesis is bizarre, for reasons the Huffington Post
laid out when it reported on the controversy provoked by CAPs
invitation.
The emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to
receive them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of
Tanden (right), a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama
They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts ofmaterial.
accommodation in response to AIPACs and Lewis vehement complaints
that CAP is allowing its writers to be anti-Israel. Other emails
show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large
portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs
incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support
future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S.
pay for the invasions.
For years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its
ties to the Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of
Washingtons most powerful political operatives. The group is likely
to become even more influential due to its deep and countless ties to
the Clintons. As the Washington Posts Greg Sargent put it earlier
this year: CAP is poised to exert outsized influence over the 2016
president race and should Hillary Clinton win it the policies and
agenda of the 45th President of the United States. CAP founder John
Podesta is set to run Clintons presidential campaign, and current CAP
president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton confidante and adviser.
The recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated
substantial confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans.
Netanyahu sacrificed much of his popularity with the Democratic Party
by crusading against the Iran nuclear deal, the Huffington Post
noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly treated the Obama White House as a
political enemy. Indeed, just today, Netanyahu appointed as his new
chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested
President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John
Kerrys mental age to that of a preteen.
A core objective of Netanyahus trip to Washington is to re-establish
credibility among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason,
the Huffington Post reported, the Israeli government pushed hard for
an invite to CAP and was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied
pressure to CAP to allow Netanyahu to speak.
The article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the groups
capitulation to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one:
Netanyahu is looking for that progressive validation, and theyre
basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has
disavowed the two-state solution, which is CAPs own prior work. Matt
Duss, a former foreign policy analyst at CAP, said the idea that CAP
would agree to give him bipartisan cover is really disappointing
since this is someone who is an enemy of the progressive agenda, who
has targeted Israeli human rights organizations throughout his term,
and was re-elected on the back of blatant anti-Arab race-baiting. Yet
another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib, published an article in The
Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but formally aligned himself with
the GOP, writing: That a liberal institution feels the need to kowtow
to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes about either how out of
touch or how craven it can be.
BUT NONE OF THIS should be surprising. The Nation previously
investigated CAPs once-secret list of corporate donors, documenting
how the group will abandon Democratic Party orthodoxy whenever that
orthodoxy conflicts with the interests of its funders. That article
noted that Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to openly court donors,
which has impacted CAPs work. Staffers were very clearly instructed
to check with the think tanks development team before writing
anything that might upset contributors.
Since that article, CAP, to its credit, has provided some greater
transparency about its funding sources. As the Washington Posts
Sargent reported earlier this year, CAPs top donors include Walmart
and Citigroup, and also include the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, which represents leading biotech and
bio-pharma firms, and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Other large
CAP donors include Goldman Sachs, the Em¬bassy of the United Ar¬ab
Emir¬ates, Bank of America, Google and Time Warner.
Still, many of its largest donors remain concealed. That is disturbing
because of persistent reports that CAP manipulates and suppresses its
own writers opinions to suit the interests of its donors. One former
CAP staffer described to The Intercept the not-so-subtle ways they
were pressured to abandon positions that offended CAPs donors; the
staffer was directed to meet with corporate lobbyists who argued
against his progressive position on a widely debated political
controversy, and was told by CAP officials that his views were bad
and unhelpful.
But on Israel, CAPs efforts to manipulate the content of its
publications are even more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the
group has repeatedly demonstrated it will go to almost any length to
keep AIPAC and its pro-Israel donors happy, regardless of how such
behavior subverts its pretense of independent advocacy.
In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to
brand several young, liberal writers at CAPs blog, ThinkProgress, as
anti-Semites due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP
and its writers were widely vilified for what Ben Smith, then of
Politico, called deviations from the bipartisan consensus on Israel,
and for voicing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel
heretofore confined to the political margins. Among other crimes,
these CAP writers stood accused of failing to sufficiently praise the
Netanyahu government: Warm words for Israel can be hard to find on
[CAPs] blogs, Smith noted.
Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by
Tanden, applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to
AIPAC. As Gharib, one of the vilified CAP writers, recounted last
week, CAPs positions moving forward from the attacks including but
not limited to virtually banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu
from our writings and, in at least one case, needlessly censoring a
piece after publication were guided by how to return to AIPACs good
graces, often in coordination with AIPAC itself. Most of the CAP
writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the organization
within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly revealed
that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
THESE NEWLY PUBLISHED EMAILS reveal AIPAC-pleasing efforts far more
heavy-handed than previously known. On January 20, 2012 at the
height of the controversy over ThinkProgress publications on Israel
Tanden wrote an email to CAP founder John Podesta and several of her
top aides, including ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum. In that email,
Tanden recounted an angry call she received from Ann Lewis who, among
other D.C. roles, served as the representative of Hillary Clintons
2008 campaign on Jewish matters and is also a board member of Blocks
hard-line group The Israel Project. The email reflects the censorship
demands being imposed on CAP over Israel and how seriously Tanden was
taking those demands:
That phone call was preceded by a rambling, detailed email from Lewis
to Tanden, describing the audit she conducted of ThinkProgress output
over several weeks about Israel and identifying all of the offending
Ambassador Michael Oren was called a liar in two posts, complainedreporting:
Lewis, and there are regular criticisms of the Israeli government
but no mention of rocket attacks from Gaza. (All of the leaked CAP
emails referenced in this article can be read here.) Four days after
Lewis angry phone call, two ThinkProgress writers, Gharib and Eli
Clifton, published an investigation that exposed the funding sources
behind a controversial anti-Muslim film called The Third Jihad,
which had been used as training material by the NYPD. The film was
produced by a shadowy group calling itself The Clarion Fund, about
which almost nothing was known. Through outstanding shoe-leather
reporting, Gharib and Clifton revealed numerous ties between that
group and various Israeli settlers and other extremists.
Because it dared to discuss Israeli activists, publication of this
exposé provoked serious consternation from Tanden, as this email
exchange demonstrates. It begins with an email from long-time
Democratic Party operative Howard Wolfson, formerly a top aide to
Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, which provides a link to the piece
with one simple message: For the love of god! Tandens reply
expressed concern about whether Israel should have been included in the
told him: For AIPAC?
Soon after their article was published, it was severely censored.
Virtually every reference to Israelis was simply deleted. The neocon
magazine Weekly Standard first noticed the censorship and reveled in
the success of the campaign to force CAP to suppress Israel
criticisms. Somebody at the Center for American Progress
ThinkProgress realized that what had been published was completely
inappropriate. Within what seems to have been a few hours, the post
was scrubbed, it noted. The good news is that there seems to be at
least one grown up at the Center for American Progress, it proclaimed.
One of the articles authors, Gharib, told The Intercept that Tanden
implemented a policy requiring that any material about Israel was to
receive special review from a designated editor before being
published. Gharib and Clifton did not submit this particular article
for special review in advance of publication because it concerned only
individual Israeli funders, not Israel itself. That editor, however,
went into the article hours after it was published and deleted the
references to Israelis. When asked, CAPs senior national security
fellow and then-chief-of-staff, Ken Gude, said he does not recall
this specific incident.
The website Mondoweiss, which had trumpeted the importance of this
Clarion Group report when it was first published, detailed the
following day that the piece originally contained four explicit
references to Israel. Now it contains only one, at the end, an aside
about Gingrich. As Mondoweiss put it, This is a shocking effort to
remove any description of the Israel lobby from a major ideological
and political undertaking.
Shocking indeed. But it was all part of a larger CAP effort to assure
AIPAC and the likes of Ann Lewis that it would not allow any
meaningful criticisms of Israel to be voiced. In a Washington Post
article on the Josh Block-created campaign against CAP, Gude groveled,
reciting this loyalty
pledge: The clear and overwhelming record of the literally hundreds
of articles and policy papers from the Center for American Progress
and ThinkProgress demonstrates our longstanding support both for
Israel and the two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as
being in the moral and national security interests of the United States.
CAP also denounced the language used by its writers as inappropriate
and boasted to the Post that they deleted some of the tweets that were
deemed offensive. And after his article was censored, Gharib was told
by a CAP editor that he was to avoid criticizing American Jewish
groups, such as AIPAC, under any circumstances. When he asked whether
this was a temporary ban in light of the controversy or a permanent
one i.e., when he could once again write about such groups the editor
Probably never.interests.
Less than two weeks after CAP criticized its own writers to the
Washington Post, the groups top officials celebrated that their
censorship efforts and public groveling seemed to be restoring them to
AIPACs good graces. On February 1, 2012 exactly one week after
publication of the heavily censored post Gude wrote an excited email
to top CAP officials, including Tanden. The subject was Gudes meeting
with AIPACs deputy director of policy and government affairs, Jeff
Colman, which Gude gushed was very positive.
In light of the steps we have taken the public apologies, the
censorship, the denouncing of CAPs own writers AIPAC, said Gude,
deemed that CAP now was moving in the right direction. The AIPAC
official singled out several CAP staffers for praise, saying AIPAC now
believes CAP/AF is in good hands. Gude celebrated the rewards CAP
was likely to receive for its good behavior: I bet we get a lot of
invitations to attend an upcoming AIPAC event, Gude predicted. And
its very likely that Im going to Israel on one of their upcoming
trips.
The list of CAP employees who received the AIPAC stamp of approval is
telling indeed: Jeff is a big fan of Rudy and Brian. Rudy is Rudy
DeLeon, who, in addition to serving as a CAP senior fellow and being a
former Pentagon official, is now a member of the board of directors of
General Dynamics; hes literally being paid by weapons manufacturers
as he helps manage CAPs positions. Brian is Brian Katulis, also a
CAP senior fellow whose work focuses on U.S. national security policy
in the Middle East and South Asia; he simultaneously works as a
senior adviser to the strategic consulting firm Albright Stonebridge
Group, assisting clients with issues related to the Middle East and
South Asia. Katulis was one of the first to publicly distance CAP
from the work of its own writers on Israel.
That is who AIPAC demanded shape CAPs positions, and that is exactly
what AIPAC got: people literally paid by the permanent corporate war
faction in Washington to promote its agenda and serve its interests.
Gude claims that when citing all the steps that convinced AIPAC that
CAP was moving in the right direction, he was referring to only one
incident,
namely: We were responding to a controversy that originated from a
young staffers use of his personal social media account. We
instituted a social media policy for the organization that asked staff
to make clear that their personal social media accounts represented
their own views and a reminder that even in that context, their social
media messages reflect on the organization.
Notably, Tandens effort to suppress Israel reporting began well
before the anti-CAP public campaign was launched. As one former CAP
staffer recounted to The Intercept, Tanden, almost immediately upon
her return to CAP from the Obama White House in late 2010, summoned
senior staff to a meeting at which she demanded to know why CAP was
covering Israel/Palestine. She said she understood that Israel was
one of three issues along with trade and guns
that were off the table for CAP, and did not understand why
ThinkProgress was devoting coverage to it. In response to questions
for this article, CAPs Ken Gude denied that these topics were off
limits, and cited numerous posts published and events hosted by the
group on those topics from 2012-2015 (after the reported conversation
with Tanden took place).
When told that the CAP blog had hired several writers such as Matt
Duss who specialized in that area, and that CAPs work was consistent
with the Obama White Houses intention to confront Israel on
settlements, Tanden re-iterated her view that it was not
constructive for CAP to work on Israel, particularly in such a
critical manner. The subsequent public controversy aimed at CAP, and
the resulting censoring of its own writers, had its genesis in
Tandens pre-existing belief that Israel should be avoided.
GIVEN ALL THIS, it is anything but surprising that ever since it rid
itself of its troublesome Israel heretics, CAPs foreign policy
positions have been hawkish in the extreme. One remarkable email
exchange in particular reveals the critical role played by Tanden in
that positioning. In October 2011, a CAP national security writer,
Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion on CNN about whether
Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to the U.S. as
compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having liberated
Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first
bomb a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for
doing so, Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense:
Tandens argument is quite similar to Donald Trumps long-time stance
about Iraqi oil: I say we should take it and pay ourselves back. But
Tandens twist on the argument that Americans will continue to
support foreign wars only if they see the invaded countries forced to
turn over assets that the U.S. can use to fund its own programs is
singularly perverse, as it turns the U.S. military into some sort of
explicit for-profit imperial force. As Shakir put it in a subsequent
email, that suggestion would make people start to think that our
military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas of other people.
At first glance, CAPs devotion to AIPAC and Netanyahu may seem
strange given that it is so plainly at odds with the Obama White Houses
But CAP like so many leading D.C. think tanks with pretenses toboard.
objective scholarship has repeatedly proven that it prioritizes
servitude to its donors interests even over its partisan loyalties.
In the case of Israel and Netanyahu, there is an even more significant
factor at play: Tanden is far more of a Clinton loyalist than an Obama
loyalist, and a core strategy of the Clinton campaign is to depict
Hillary as supremely devoted to Israel. Just last night, Clinton
published an op-ed in The Forward on Israel that is so extreme it has
to be read to be believed. Its core purpose is clear from its headline
and photo: to implicitly criticize Obama for being too adversarial to
Israel and Netanyahu, while vowing that she, as president, will be the
most stalwart Israel loyalist imaginable:
Clintons op-ed reads like the ultimate loyalty oath: I have stood
with Israel my entire career. As president, I will continue this fight.
Moreover, she writes, Netanyahus visit to Washington on November 9
is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and
unity between the people and governments of the United States and
Israel. She
vows: I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership
and strengthen Americas security commitment to Israel, ensuring that
it always has the qualitative military edge to defend itself. That
includes immediately dispatching a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to meet with senior Israeli commanders. I would also invite the
Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.
There is not a peep of criticism about the Israeli occupation or the
violence it has used against Palestinians, though the op-ed does
harshly scold the occupied people: Israelis have to look over their
shoulders during everyday tasks, like carrying groceries and waiting
for the bus. This violence must not be allowed to continue. It needs
to stop immediately.
Many of us have seen the video of a cleric encouraging worshippers
to stab Jews as he waves a knife in the air. This incitement needs to
end, period,
etc. etc.
In that context, CAPs servitude to AIPAC and pandering to Netanyahu
makes all the sense in the world. It may conflict with the Obama White
Houses preferences, but it very clearly serves its new primary goal:
advancement of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Though Gude insists CAP did not communicate with the Clinton campaign
about the Netanyahu invitation, he acknowledges that the CAP board
was informed and [Clinton campaign head] John Podesta and [campaign
official] Jose Villarreal are members of the CAP board. They did not
have a role in making the decision to do the event. Whatever else is
true, as Clintons op-ed last night makes clear, she has clearly
adopted a strategy of siding with Netanyahu and Israel over the Obama
White House, and CAP, with its characteristic subservience, is fully on
UPDATE: Tandens office originally indicated she was traveling todayWhite House official.
and thus was unable to respond to The Intercepts inquiries, but
shortly after publication of this article, CAPs Daniella Leger
provided this comment about our questions about Tandens views on
Libyan oil revenues: Were a think tank, and we have internal
discussions and dialogues all the time on a variety of issues. We
encourage throwing out ideas to spur conversation and spark debate. We
did not take a position on this, but ThinkProgress covered it. The
posts certainly did not endorse the idea.
Ironically, one of those ThinkProgress posts she cited mockingly
describes Michele Bachmanns views, which are strikingly similar to
the ones expressed by Tanden: At last nights GOP presidential
debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann
(R-MN) said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts
in those two countries. The other link described how even Rick
Santorum condemned this oil-seizure idea the one advocated by Tanden
and Bachmann as immoral and counterproductive: I think that would
send every possible wrong signal that America went to war for oil,
said the right-wing former GOP senator.
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valid.
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-gro
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tps://
theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group-revea
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Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on
Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
09 November 15
eaked internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center
for American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies
involving the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning
on Israel. They reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in
order to placate AIPAC and long-time Clinton operative and Israel
activist Ann Lewis including censoring its own writers on the topic
of Israel.
The emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAPs
controversial decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as A
Conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will feature CAP
President Neera Tanden and Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they
explore ways to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the
United States. That a group whose core mission is loyalty to the
White House and the Democratic Party would roll out the red carpet for
a hostile Obama nemesis is bizarre, for reasons the Huffington Post
laid out when it reported on the controversy provoked by CAPs
invitation.
The emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to
receive them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of
Tanden (right), a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama
They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts ofmaterial.
accommodation in response to AIPACs and Lewis vehement complaints
that CAP is allowing its writers to be anti-Israel. Other emails
show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large
portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs
incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support
future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S.
pay for the invasions.
For years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its
ties to the Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of
Washingtons most powerful political operatives. The group is likely
to become even more influential due to its deep and countless ties to
the Clintons. As the Washington Posts Greg Sargent put it earlier
this year: CAP is poised to exert outsized influence over the 2016
president race and should Hillary Clinton win it the policies and
agenda of the 45th President of the United States. CAP founder John
Podesta is set to run Clintons presidential campaign, and current CAP
president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton confidante and adviser.
The recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated
substantial confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans.
Netanyahu sacrificed much of his popularity with the Democratic Party
by crusading against the Iran nuclear deal, the Huffington Post
noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly treated the Obama White House as a
political enemy. Indeed, just today, Netanyahu appointed as his new
chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested
President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John
Kerrys mental age to that of a preteen.
A core objective of Netanyahus trip to Washington is to re-establish
credibility among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason,
the Huffington Post reported, the Israeli government pushed hard for
an invite to CAP and was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied
pressure to CAP to allow Netanyahu to speak.
The article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the groups
capitulation to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one:
Netanyahu is looking for that progressive validation, and theyre
basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has
disavowed the two-state solution, which is CAPs own prior work. Matt
Duss, a former foreign policy analyst at CAP, said the idea that CAP
would agree to give him bipartisan cover is really disappointing
since this is someone who is an enemy of the progressive agenda, who
has targeted Israeli human rights organizations throughout his term,
and was re-elected on the back of blatant anti-Arab race-baiting. Yet
another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib, published an article in The
Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but formally aligned himself with
the GOP, writing: That a liberal institution feels the need to kowtow
to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes about either how out of
touch or how craven it can be.
BUT NONE OF THIS should be surprising. The Nation previously
investigated CAPs once-secret list of corporate donors, documenting
how the group will abandon Democratic Party orthodoxy whenever that
orthodoxy conflicts with the interests of its funders. That article
noted that Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to openly court donors,
which has impacted CAPs work. Staffers were very clearly instructed
to check with the think tanks development team before writing
anything that might upset contributors.
Since that article, CAP, to its credit, has provided some greater
transparency about its funding sources. As the Washington Posts
Sargent reported earlier this year, CAPs top donors include Walmart
and Citigroup, and also include the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, which represents leading biotech and
bio-pharma firms, and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Other large
CAP donors include Goldman Sachs, the Embassy of the United Arab
Emirates, Bank of America, Google and Time Warner.
Still, many of its largest donors remain concealed. That is disturbing
because of persistent reports that CAP manipulates and suppresses its
own writers opinions to suit the interests of its donors. One former
CAP staffer described to The Intercept the not-so-subtle ways they
were pressured to abandon positions that offended CAPs donors; the
staffer was directed to meet with corporate lobbyists who argued
against his progressive position on a widely debated political
controversy, and was told by CAP officials that his views were bad
and unhelpful.
But on Israel, CAPs efforts to manipulate the content of its
publications are even more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the
group has repeatedly demonstrated it will go to almost any length to
keep AIPAC and its pro-Israel donors happy, regardless of how such
behavior subverts its pretense of independent advocacy.
In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to
brand several young, liberal writers at CAPs blog, ThinkProgress, as
anti-Semites due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP
and its writers were widely vilified for what Ben Smith, then of
Politico, called deviations from the bipartisan consensus on Israel,
and for voicing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel
heretofore confined to the political margins. Among other crimes,
these CAP writers stood accused of failing to sufficiently praise the
Netanyahu government: Warm words for Israel can be hard to find on
[CAPs] blogs, Smith noted.
Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by
Tanden, applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to
AIPAC. As Gharib, one of the vilified CAP writers, recounted last
week, CAPs positions moving forward from the attacks including but
not limited to virtually banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu
from our writings and, in at least one case, needlessly censoring a
piece after publication were guided by how to return to AIPACs good
graces, often in coordination with AIPAC itself. Most of the CAP
writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the organization
within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly revealed
that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
THESE NEWLY PUBLISHED EMAILS reveal AIPAC-pleasing efforts far more
heavy-handed than previously known. On January 20, 2012 at the
height of the controversy over ThinkProgress publications on Israel
Tanden wrote an email to CAP founder John Podesta and several of her
top aides, including ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum. In that email,
Tanden recounted an angry call she received from Ann Lewis who, among
other D.C. roles, served as the representative of Hillary Clintons
2008 campaign on Jewish matters and is also a board member of Blocks
hard-line group The Israel Project. The email reflects the censorship
demands being imposed on CAP over Israel and how seriously Tanden was
taking those demands:
That phone call was preceded by a rambling, detailed email from Lewis
to Tanden, describing the audit she conducted of ThinkProgress output
over several weeks about Israel and identifying all of the offending
Ambassador Michael Oren was called a liar in two posts, complainedreporting:
Lewis, and there are regular criticisms of the Israeli government
but no mention of rocket attacks from Gaza. (All of the leaked CAP
emails referenced in this article can be read here.) Four days after
Lewis angry phone call, two ThinkProgress writers, Gharib and Eli
Clifton, published an investigation that exposed the funding sources
behind a controversial anti-Muslim film called The Third Jihad,
which had been used as training material by the NYPD. The film was
produced by a shadowy group calling itself The Clarion Fund, about
which almost nothing was known. Through outstanding shoe-leather
reporting, Gharib and Clifton revealed numerous ties between that
group and various Israeli settlers and other extremists.
Because it dared to discuss Israeli activists, publication of this
exposé provoked serious consternation from Tanden, as this email
exchange demonstrates. It begins with an email from long-time
Democratic Party operative Howard Wolfson, formerly a top aide to
Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, which provides a link to the piece
with one simple message: For the love of god! Tandens reply
expressed concern about whether Israel should have been included in the
told him: For AIPAC?
Soon after their article was published, it was severely censored.
Virtually every reference to Israelis was simply deleted. The neocon
magazine Weekly Standard first noticed the censorship and reveled in
the success of the campaign to force CAP to suppress Israel
criticisms. Somebody at the Center for American Progress
ThinkProgress realized that what had been published was completely
inappropriate. Within what seems to have been a few hours, the post
was scrubbed, it noted. The good news is that there seems to be at
least one grown up at the Center for American Progress, it proclaimed.
One of the articles authors, Gharib, told The Intercept that Tanden
implemented a policy requiring that any material about Israel was to
receive special review from a designated editor before being
published. Gharib and Clifton did not submit this particular article
for special review in advance of publication because it concerned only
individual Israeli funders, not Israel itself. That editor, however,
went into the article hours after it was published and deleted the
references to Israelis. When asked, CAPs senior national security
fellow and then-chief-of-staff, Ken Gude, said he does not recall
this specific incident.
The website Mondoweiss, which had trumpeted the importance of this
Clarion Group report when it was first published, detailed the
following day that the piece originally contained four explicit
references to Israel. Now it contains only one, at the end, an aside
about Gingrich. As Mondoweiss put it, This is a shocking effort to
remove any description of the Israel lobby from a major ideological
and political undertaking.
Shocking indeed. But it was all part of a larger CAP effort to assure
AIPAC and the likes of Ann Lewis that it would not allow any
meaningful criticisms of Israel to be voiced. In a Washington Post
article on the Josh Block-created campaign against CAP, Gude groveled,
reciting this loyalty
pledge: The clear and overwhelming record of the literally hundreds
of articles and policy papers from the Center for American Progress
and ThinkProgress demonstrates our longstanding support both for
Israel and the two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as
being in the moral and national security interests of the United States.
CAP also denounced the language used by its writers as inappropriate
and boasted to the Post that they deleted some of the tweets that were
deemed offensive. And after his article was censored, Gharib was told
by a CAP editor that he was to avoid criticizing American Jewish
groups, such as AIPAC, under any circumstances. When he asked whether
this was a temporary ban in light of the controversy or a permanent
one i.e., when he could once again write about such groups the editor
Probably never.interests.
Less than two weeks after CAP criticized its own writers to the
Washington Post, the groups top officials celebrated that their
censorship efforts and public groveling seemed to be restoring them to
AIPACs good graces. On February 1, 2012 exactly one week after
publication of the heavily censored post Gude wrote an excited email
to top CAP officials, including Tanden. The subject was Gudes meeting
with AIPACs deputy director of policy and government affairs, Jeff
Colman, which Gude gushed was very positive.
In light of the steps we have taken the public apologies, the
censorship, the denouncing of CAPs own writers AIPAC, said Gude,
deemed that CAP now was moving in the right direction. The AIPAC
official singled out several CAP staffers for praise, saying AIPAC now
believes CAP/AF is in good hands. Gude celebrated the rewards CAP
was likely to receive for its good behavior: I bet we get a lot of
invitations to attend an upcoming AIPAC event, Gude predicted. And
its very likely that Im going to Israel on one of their upcoming
trips.
The list of CAP employees who received the AIPAC stamp of approval is
telling indeed: Jeff is a big fan of Rudy and Brian. Rudy is Rudy
DeLeon, who, in addition to serving as a CAP senior fellow and being a
former Pentagon official, is now a member of the board of directors of
General Dynamics; hes literally being paid by weapons manufacturers
as he helps manage CAPs positions. Brian is Brian Katulis, also a
CAP senior fellow whose work focuses on U.S. national security policy
in the Middle East and South Asia; he simultaneously works as a
senior adviser to the strategic consulting firm Albright Stonebridge
Group, assisting clients with issues related to the Middle East and
South Asia. Katulis was one of the first to publicly distance CAP
from the work of its own writers on Israel.
That is who AIPAC demanded shape CAPs positions, and that is exactly
what AIPAC got: people literally paid by the permanent corporate war
faction in Washington to promote its agenda and serve its interests.
Gude claims that when citing all the steps that convinced AIPAC that
CAP was moving in the right direction, he was referring to only one
incident,
namely: We were responding to a controversy that originated from a
young staffers use of his personal social media account. We
instituted a social media policy for the organization that asked staff
to make clear that their personal social media accounts represented
their own views and a reminder that even in that context, their social
media messages reflect on the organization.
Notably, Tandens effort to suppress Israel reporting began well
before the anti-CAP public campaign was launched. As one former CAP
staffer recounted to The Intercept, Tanden, almost immediately upon
her return to CAP from the Obama White House in late 2010, summoned
senior staff to a meeting at which she demanded to know why CAP was
covering Israel/Palestine. She said she understood that Israel was
one of three issues along with trade and guns
that were off the table for CAP, and did not understand why
ThinkProgress was devoting coverage to it. In response to questions
for this article, CAPs Ken Gude denied that these topics were off
limits, and cited numerous posts published and events hosted by the
group on those topics from 2012-2015 (after the reported conversation
with Tanden took place).
When told that the CAP blog had hired several writers such as Matt
Duss who specialized in that area, and that CAPs work was consistent
with the Obama White Houses intention to confront Israel on
settlements, Tanden re-iterated her view that it was not
constructive for CAP to work on Israel, particularly in such a
critical manner. The subsequent public controversy aimed at CAP, and
the resulting censoring of its own writers, had its genesis in
Tandens pre-existing belief that Israel should be avoided.
GIVEN ALL THIS, it is anything but surprising that ever since it rid
itself of its troublesome Israel heretics, CAPs foreign policy
positions have been hawkish in the extreme. One remarkable email
exchange in particular reveals the critical role played by Tanden in
that positioning. In October 2011, a CAP national security writer,
Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion on CNN about whether
Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to the U.S. as
compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having liberated
Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first
bomb a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for
doing so, Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense:
Tandens argument is quite similar to Donald Trumps long-time stance
about Iraqi oil: I say we should take it and pay ourselves back. But
Tandens twist on the argument that Americans will continue to
support foreign wars only if they see the invaded countries forced to
turn over assets that the U.S. can use to fund its own programs is
singularly perverse, as it turns the U.S. military into some sort of
explicit for-profit imperial force. As Shakir put it in a subsequent
email, that suggestion would make people start to think that our
military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas of other people.
At first glance, CAPs devotion to AIPAC and Netanyahu may seem
strange given that it is so plainly at odds with the Obama White Houses
But CAP like so many leading D.C. think tanks with pretenses toboard.
objective scholarship has repeatedly proven that it prioritizes
servitude to its donors interests even over its partisan loyalties.
In the case of Israel and Netanyahu, there is an even more significant
factor at play: Tanden is far more of a Clinton loyalist than an Obama
loyalist, and a core strategy of the Clinton campaign is to depict
Hillary as supremely devoted to Israel. Just last night, Clinton
published an op-ed in The Forward on Israel that is so extreme it has
to be read to be believed. Its core purpose is clear from its headline
and photo: to implicitly criticize Obama for being too adversarial to
Israel and Netanyahu, while vowing that she, as president, will be the
most stalwart Israel loyalist imaginable:
Clintons op-ed reads like the ultimate loyalty oath: I have stood
with Israel my entire career. As president, I will continue this fight.
Moreover, she writes, Netanyahus visit to Washington on November 9
is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and
unity between the people and governments of the United States and
Israel. She
vows: I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership
and strengthen Americas security commitment to Israel, ensuring that
it always has the qualitative military edge to defend itself. That
includes immediately dispatching a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to meet with senior Israeli commanders. I would also invite the
Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.
There is not a peep of criticism about the Israeli occupation or the
violence it has used against Palestinians, though the op-ed does
harshly scold the occupied people: Israelis have to look over their
shoulders during everyday tasks, like carrying groceries and waiting
for the bus. This violence must not be allowed to continue. It needs
to stop immediately.
Many of us have seen the video of a cleric encouraging worshippers
to stab Jews as he waves a knife in the air. This incitement needs to
end, period,
etc. etc.
In that context, CAPs servitude to AIPAC and pandering to Netanyahu
makes all the sense in the world. It may conflict with the Obama White
Houses preferences, but it very clearly serves its new primary goal:
advancement of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Though Gude insists CAP did not communicate with the Clinton campaign
about the Netanyahu invitation, he acknowledges that the CAP board
was informed and [Clinton campaign head] John Podesta and [campaign
official] Jose Villarreal are members of the CAP board. They did not
have a role in making the decision to do the event. Whatever else is
true, as Clintons op-ed last night makes clear, she has clearly
adopted a strategy of siding with Netanyahu and Israel over the Obama
White House, and CAP, with its characteristic subservience, is fully on
UPDATE: Tandens office originally indicated she was traveling today
and thus was unable to respond to The Intercepts inquiries, but
shortly after publication of this article, CAPs Daniella Leger
provided this comment about our questions about Tandens views on
Libyan oil revenues: Were a think tank, and we have internal
discussions and dialogues all the time on a variety of issues. We
encourage throwing out ideas to spur conversation and spark debate. We
did not take a position on this, but ThinkProgress covered it. The
posts certainly did not endorse the idea.
Ironically, one of those ThinkProgress posts she cited mockingly
describes Michele Bachmanns views, which are strikingly similar to
the ones expressed by Tanden: At last nights GOP presidential
debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann
(R-MN) said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts
in those two countries. The other link described how even Rick
Santorum condemned this oil-seizure idea the one advocated by Tanden
and Bachmann as immoral and counterproductive: I think that would
send every possible wrong signal that America went to war for oil,
said the right-wing former GOP senator.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
